Wednesday marked the launch of Quarkbase, a website popularity index. Quarkbase.com's purpose for being is to know all about your site. Its logo says it all: "Everything about a Website."
It delivers by aggregating the information from a lot of searches you could perform on your own. Alexa site traffic, domain and registrar contact information; the number of Digg, Reddit, Yahoo Answers, and Wikipedia entries. It's a hefty amount of information and a one-stop shop to get a high-level view of a website's popularity.
Impressively, the site even generates its statistics on the fly when it comes across a page for the first time -- complete with a status bar at the bottom of the screen to show you its progress.
Here's what made my ears perk: It tells you the language and framework used to create the site, whether the site is running off of Apache or IIS, and the number of DOM elements on the page.
I don't want to be greedy, but I want even more information. What version of Apache? How many frontends does the site have? What version of SQL? Where is the nearest server? Which web frameworks are used? What is its average load time?
It seems like Quarkbase could answer some of these questions and give us a peak at how the big web guns truly work.
While a deep dive into practically everything would be nice, I have to credit Quarkbase (and Alexa, for which it relies on heavily for site statistics -- questionable ones at that) for what it does now. It provides a great high level overview of a site and a great web research tool.
Note: Their latest tweet suggests the site is straining under the weight of launch. Your mileage may vary.
